Something awful

Something awful

Mr TS Eliot has written something plain
And some’s understood it, so authorities complain
And GB Shaw’s confessed that he has never had a brain
There’s going to be an earthquake, or perhaps torrential rain
Something awful!

Someone says the Loch Ness Monster isn’t very fond of swimming
That Russia’s running syndicates for patent whisker-trimming
That Roosevelt’s got so fond of beer, he goes to watch the skimming
That De Valera’s getting fat, GK Chesterton is slimming
Something awful!

It is rumoured, though we doubt it, that Dean Inge has laughed outright
That parliament  has stayed awake for nearly all one night
And we’ve even heard it whispered, though we hardly think it’s quiet
That a don has climbed a lamp post, and a proctor has got tight
Some’think’ awful!

Someone has mistaken Harry Lauder for a monk
And Mussolini, we are told, is suffering from funk
And railway porters tell us, though we think it must be bunk
That someone’s come to Cambridge without a single trunk
Something awful!

Leonard Henry** has played Hamlet to an overcrowded house
The senate has been raided in the midst of a carouse
And we’re told exams are suffered without a single grouse
That some cinema has run a show without a Mickey Mouse
Something awful!

A regis professor has been seen without a tie
For which he was arrested, when he blacked a policeman’s eye
The writer of this poem, whose treason is most high
Has been seized by some avengers and was heard, alas, to cry
Something awful!

The modern school of poets has been playing us some tricks
With poems like addition sums that look a fearful mix
And now Miss Edith Sitwell is in an awful fix
For she’s added up her columns and divided them by six
But how awful!

*Dean William Inge, the 'Gloomy Dean' - thanks to JohnRH for deciphering Lorna's handwriting here. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Inge_%28priest%29
**Details of Leonard Henry are available on IMDb at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0377903/

This poem dates from Lorna's undergraduate days at Cambridge (1932 to 1935).